AFD Ep 388 Links and Notes - Sacco & Vanzetti 2nd Conviction Centennial - Releasing July 12 - Intro: On July 14, 1921, one hundred years ago this week and about a year after they were unjustly convicted on lesser charges for a deadly armed robbery in Bridgewater Massachusetts, Nicola Sacco & Bartolomeo Vanzetti of Italy (both around aged 30) were falsely convicted by a Massachusetts jury on first-degree murder charges for the deaths of a security guard and another man during a robbery gone wrong in Braintree, Massachusetts - Sacco & Vanzetti were suspects because of their associations with Italian anarchists known to authorities (Ferruccio Coacci and Mario Buda). When they were arrested they were carrying loaded pistols and Sacco had anarchist literature. Vanzetti had shotgun shells matching those used at the robbery in Braintree. Sacco had an alibi for the Bridgewater robbery, but not the Braintree robbery. - The Bridgewater trial came first, lasting from June 22, 1920 to sentencing on August 16, 1920. Vanzetti didn’t testify in his own defense. Many witnesses for the defense spoke little English, and the prosecution was easily able to confuse them. On July 1, 1920, the jury found Vanzetti guilty of first degree murder and robbery. However, the jury tampered with the shotgun shells produced as evidence, and the Judge Webster Thayer declared the first degree murder charge a mistrial. Thayer sentenced Vanzetti to the maximum sentence for the robbery charge, 12-15 years. Advocates for Vanzetti later claimed that the Bridgewater trial came first to make the Braintree trial easier for the prosecution. - The Braintree trial again had Judge Thayer presiding. Vanzetti had different defense lawyers, and Sacco had a lawyer - Fred H. Moore - who previously worked on cases involving the IWW. This was seen as a mistake, as Thayer was enraged by Moore’s radicalism and antics in the courtroom, which included taking off his shoes in the courtroom. Both defendants had alibis that covered the times of the robbery. Vanzetti testified that he was selling fish at the time, and Sacco was in Boston applying for a passport at the Italian consulate. Moore tried to get the consulate employee to testify, but he was in Italy and didn’t want to make the trip back to the US. He did provide a sworn affidavit, but it was dismissed. Both the prosecution and the defense attempted to use bullet forensics to make their case as to whether or not the bullet that killed the security guard could have come from Sacco’s gun. One of the prosecution’s experts, Captain Proctor of the Massachusetts State Police, later signed an affidavit stating that he was unable to positively identify the bullets as coming from Sacco’s gun. On July 14 or 21, 1921 (there are differing accounts; the official Massachusetts state govt page has July 14) after 3 hours of deliberation by the jury, they found both Sacco & Vanzetti guilty of murder. - Despite many attempts to appeal, and a confession from another man awaiting a murder trial, Sacco & Vanzetti were executed at midnight between August 22 and 23, 1927. - https://www.wickedlocal.com/photogallery/WL/20200415/NEWS/415009999/PH/1 100 year retrospective of the date of the crime. Not a lot of non-local commemoration, but that may change by Wednesday. - During our limited Lend Lease series of episodes in 2019, we touched on the Sacco & Vanzetti trial, as part of an episode discussing political violence, specifically the Propaganda of the Deed theory of violence espoused by Luigi Galleani. These acts of violence targeted high profile members of the ruling class, putting the entire class on notice. These attacks included a bombing in Franklin, MA, in 1919. - The Sacco & Vanzetti trial exposed the prejudices against Italian-American anarchists. The judge, Webster Thayer, was known to be a xenophobe and had made speeches railing against anarchists. There were court interpreters who didn’t understand the Italian dialects that some of the witnesses spoke, hampering their testimony. Sacco wasn’t even at the scene of the crime; he was at the Italian consulate in Boston. Witnesses weren’t able to accurately describe Vanzetti’s appearance, even disagreeing on the length of his mustache. Another robber even confessed to the crime between the time of the first trial and their execution; Thayer refused to reopen the case. The trial spurred worldwide protests, with many well-known socialists and other luminaries defending Sacco & Vanzetti, including Albert Einstein and Dorothy Parker. - Vanzetti said near the end, “I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as we now do by dying. Our words, our lives, our pains—nothing! The taking of our lives—lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler—all! That last moment belongs to us—that agony is our triumph.” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/sacco-and-vanzettis-trial-century-exposed-injus tice-1920s-america-180977843/ - SEGUE - [Clip repurpose from the syndicalists episode in 2019: Sacco & Vanzetti around 18:50 to 34:10 in Lend Lease 11 (ie American Anarchy Part 2)] http://arsenalfordemocracy.com/2019/08/13/lend-lease-11-american-anarchy-part-2-the- extremism-debate-and-state-violence/ - Some reading links: https://www.mass.gov/info-details/sacco-vanzetti-justice-on-trial https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sacco-and-Vanzetti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacco_and_Vanzetti Here is a repeat of the notes from the 2019 episode: - Italian-Americans heavily influenced anarchism in the United States, especially during the 3 million strong migration from Italy to the US from 1900 to 1915 (WWI) - nearly half of Italian migrants from 1905 to 1920 returned to Italy, unlike Irish or Scandinavian migrants to the US http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/europe-on-the-road/economic-migration/irial-glynn-e migration-across-the-atlantic-irish-italians-and-swedes-compared-1800-1950#Ret urnmigration - However it is critical to remember that Italian unification was only completed by the northern monarchy in 1871 and Italy remained heavily regionally fragmented, with different dialects, politics, and rural vs urban industrial backgrounds -- 1880-1900 Italian immigration in particular tended to be from the impoverished former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in Southern Italy as opposed to industrial northern Italian cities – not all politically active Italians who came to the US shared the views of the anarchist immigrants and as early as the 1890s, large numbers of Italian-Americans had already moved into the public sector roles in places like New York City and Chicago with which they are now stereotypically associated. http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/voices/italian_immigration.cfm - Also many rural Italian immigrants opted to remain in American cities in more transient manual labor jobs and avoided settling down to continue to farm. They were overwhelmingly male and usually did not bring the rest of their families with them during this period (although of course the women working during the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire were Italian or Jewish women or girls active in the trade-union movement inside the factory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Ladies%27_Garment_Workers%27_Un ion). http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/voices/italian_immigration.cfm - Italian-American political alignment and position began shifting significantly during World War One and with the interwar changes in immigration law - Eventually in Northampton Massachusetts in September 1939, at the start of World War Two, Italian-American anti-fascists formed the Mazzini Society dedicated to democratic republicanism and the removal of Mussolini, but they were reluctant to invite anti-fascists of the communist and anarchist persuasion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazzini_Society - Sacco & Vanzetti trial (1920-1927) and the wider Italian-American anarcho / trade-union movement (see Russell notes on the importance of immigrants in American radical unionism) - Sacco was from Apulia (southern Italy), whereas Vanzetti was from Piedmont (northern Italy) - Galleanism (1914-1920) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galleanists -- they often blew themselves up or random civilian bystanders and never once actually hit an intended high-profile ruling class target. (One was in Franklin MA in 1919.) They attempted a string of retaliatory attacks in the US and Europe after S&V were indicted for the robbery gone wrong - 2 trials for separate crimes in separate jurisdictions - Judge Webster Thayer was a known xenophobe and had just given an anti-Bolshevik speech. - A court interpreter didn’t know all the relevant dialects of Italian to relay defense witness testimony correctly to the jury of non-Italians - The jury also tampered with physical evidence while deliberating their verdict and part of the first case had to be thrown out - In their death penalty case for the murder, they were represented by a radical IWW lawyer who went over even worse with Judge Thayer. When S&V testified in the second case (they did not in the first), they rambled a lot trying to explain their political views instead of avoiding that. (They had skipped the draft in 1917 and hid in Mexico too.) - Sacco literally was not present for the murder he was charged with because he was inside the Italian consulate in Boston at the time and consular staff backed that up but were unable to be present for the trial - Prosecutors also insisted OJ-trial-style that an article of clothing recovered from the crime scene much later that did not fit the defendant (Sacco’s cap) was definitely his and proof of his guilt - 60 cities in Italy held protests against the verdicts.